It's in the air [Guest Editorial]

I it is a great pleasure for Brian Parsons of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and myself to once again serve as guest editors of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine. This special issue is dedicated to the integration of wind power plants into power system planning and operations. It has been truly phenomenal to watch the explosion of interest and information about this topic in the past fi ve years. We have gone from a situation in which wind energy was a boutique business that was not taken very seriously to one in which wind now accounts for the second-largest share of new generating capacity installed in the past year (just behind natural gas).